How Not to Be a Great Teacher

I was talking about the school days with a friend of mine yesterday and got into the subject of teachers. We have all had a wide variety of them, ranging from good to terrible. I remember almost all my school teachers, from first grade to university. Thinking about them now as people, instead of “the maths teacher, the PE teacher” etc, paints a completely different picture. A more personal and in some cases disturbing one.

Talking about pictures, my arts teacher in year eight comes to mind. She was an obese, older lady, who almost always wore the same shirt. It was a light blue jeans shirt that was so big you only needed tent pins to get a place to stay.

I don’t remember her name, but I remember her talking constantly without pause, just stopping for a second to do a great big inhale, like she was a whale sucking in as much plankton as she could. She could be very mean as well. I didn’t care that much, because I was in a period in my life where I didn’t bother with anything, but obviously she still made an impression since I remember her many years later.

“Well it is obvious you didn’t understand the concept of the exercise”, “I can see you are not really talented with this”, “I kind of would have expected something better”, were a few of her typical feedback lines. She probably thought we had all enthusiastically signed up for this class and that we all wanted to be artists, and she wanted to dash those hopes before they had gone to our heads. Kind of the opposite of inspiration and really not needed for school-tired 15 year-olds.

But we all got our revenge at the end of the day, because when her likely miserable work day was over she had to climb into her microscopic red Lada (the car brand from Hell, or was it Russia?) which took her something like ten minutes and made all the students in the vicinity stop what they were doing just to look at her. She was almost as a big as the car and she had to bend all her massive limbs and rearrange her layers of fat in an optimal way to fit in it. As soon as she had sat down in the driver’s seat the car tilted heavily to one side and it was a wonder that it would start and that she could actually drive it with the steering wheel making an indent in her stomach.

If she once was an aspiring artist who failed and became a grumpy teacher, I don’t know. I never saw her draw and she never talked about it. But she taught us all that if we ever wanted to pursue arts, we better not, because honestly, we all sucked.

So now I’m a creative director.